writes that America "was and to a large
extent still is a Christian nation," and that
"our culture should be permeated with a
distinctively Christian flavoring." When I
asked him ifhe believed that Bachmann's
views were fully consistent with the pre-
vailing ideology at O.R.U. and the themes
of his book, he said, "Yes." Later, he
added, "I do not know of any way in
which they are not."
Eidsmoe has stirred controversy. In
2005, he spoke at the national convention
of the Council of Conservative Citizens,
a defiandy pro-white, and anti-black, or-
ganization. (Eidsmoe says that he deeply
despises racism, but that he will speak "to
anyone.") In Alabama last year, he ad-
dressed an event commemorating Seces-
sion Day and told an interviewer that
it was the state's "constitutional right to
secede," and that "Jefferson Davis and
John C. Calhoun understood the Consti-
tution better than did Abraham Lincoln
and Daniel Webster." In April, 2010, he
was disinvited from a Tea Party rally in
Wausau, Wisconsin, because of these
statements and appearances.
Bachmann has not, however, dis-
tanced herself: and she has long described
her work for Eidsmoe as an important
part of her résumé. This spring, she told a
church audience in Iowa, "I went down to
Oral Roberts University, and one of the
professors that had a great influence on
me was an Iowan named John Eidsmoe.
He's from Iowa, and he's a wonderful
man. He has theology degrees, he has law
degrees, he's absolutely brilliant. He
taught me about so many aspects of our
godly heritage."
I n 1986, after Bachmann graduated
from O.R.U., she and Marcus moved to
Virginia Beach. Marcus earned a master's
degree in counselling at Pat Robertson's
C.B.N. University, now known as Re-
gent University. Michele enrolled at the
College of William and Mary and, in
1988, got a master's oflaw in taxation. They
had had their first child while she was on a
break from law school, and their second ar-
rived while they were living in Virginia.
They then moved back to Minnesota. She
spent the next four years as a lawyer at the
I.R.S. Office of Chief Counsel, in St. Paul,
representing the commissioner of the
I.R.S. before the U.S. Tax Court and ad-
vising agents who were conducting audits
and collecting tax assessments.
60 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 15 & 22, 2011
Bachmann usually describes herself
vaguely as a "former federal tax litigation
attorney," but, in part because she was new,
she didn't do much litigating. I talked with
six of Bachmann' s former colleagues in the
small I.R.S. office where she worked.
Three of them still work there. No one
would speak on the record, but they all said
that Bachmann was not on the job long
enough to gain much experience.
Two of Bachmann' s five children were
born while she worked for the I.R.S., and
all six former colleagues said that the pri-
mary fact they remembered about Bach-
mann was that she spent a good portion
of her time on maternity leave--the I.R.S.
had a fairly generous policy-and that
caused resentment.
"Basically, the rest of us that were here
were handling Michele's inventory," one
former colleague said. "In her four years,
she probably didn't get more than two,
two and a half years of experience. So she
was doing lightweight stuff" A second
colleague said, "She was an attorney here,
but she was never here." (Bachmann de-
clined a request to respond.)
Many of the cases she worked on were
settled without going to trial, and there is
only one Bachmann case on file that
ended up in a courtroom. According to
court documents, in 1992 Bachmann
sought six thousand dollars in taxes from
a Chippewa Indian who failed to report
three years of income from Youth Project,
Inc., a community-organizing nonprofit
dedicated to "social justice and peace."
Bachmann doesn't like to say direcdy
that she worked for the "I.R.S.," but she
often cites her work in the tax office as
part of the reason she's qualified to be
President. The job, her campaign Web
site declares, "solidified her strong support
for efforts to simplify the Tax Code and
reduce tax burdens on family and small
business budgets."
A fter the birth of her fourth child, in
1992, Bachmann left the I.R.S. to
be a stay-at-home mother. The Bach-
manns also began taking in foster chil-
dren, all of whom were teen -age girls and
many of whom had eating disorders.
Bachmann's motivation seems to have
been to save the girls, in the same way that
she had been saved. "In my heart, God
put something in me toward young peo-
ple that I wanted to make sure the Gospel
would go out to young people," she said,
in 2006. "So that young people could
come to know Jesus at an early age, the
earlier the better, so that they wouldn't
have to go through those pitfalls."
In total, the Bachmanns took in twenty-
three girls; I spoke with one of them (she
did not want her name used), who stayed
with the Bachmanns for three and a half
years and now lives in Colorado. She said,
"I owe the Bachmanns everything. They
offered me the structure I needed and
taught me how to figure out goals. They
really encouraged me to figure out who I
was rather than who I was becoming. I
turned my life around one hundred and
eighty degrees."
In 1993, Bachmann became disturbed
by schoolwork the foster children were
bringing home. One high-school math
assignment involved a coloring project.
She began to wonder what had happened
to the disciplined education system of her
youth. When she was in school, she said
in a speech, "the shop teacher also had a
board hung up in the shop class with holes
bored in it, and he would use that on the
backside if somebody got out of line.
Anybody remember those days? That's
when I grew up. And it worked really
well." Her foster children's homework,
she continued, "had more to do with in-
doctrinating kids than educating kids.
And the indoctrination had to do with
anti-parent themes, anti-Biblical themes,
anti-education themes, anti-academic
h "
t emes.
In 1993, she and six others founded
the New Heights charter school, in Still-
water. The school was designed for at-risk
kids, and the charter agreement, signed by
all seven co-founders, mandated that the
publicly funded school "is and will be
non -sectarian in all programs, admission
policies, employment practices and all
other operations."
The minutes of the school's board
meetings show that Bachmann, who was
a member of the board, and her fellow-
administrators repeatedly violated that
rule. The C.E.O. of New Heights was
Dennis L. Meyer, an evangelical-Chris-
tian activist and former schoolteacher
who ran a prison ministry. At one of the
first meetings, on July 20th, Meyer set the
tone for how the school would be run:
"Denny encouraged the board to do
things and move forward not because we
'think' it should be done a certain way, but
because God wants us to."